It's Not That Big a Deal

The CBO Feels the Love

The Congressional Budget Office isn’t known for its awesome marketing or pithy statements. It’s never been recognized by Buzz Feed for its social media use. Nevertheless, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is enjoying an unusual amount of love on Twitter.

Here’s how you really know they’ve made it: The title of yesterday’s National Review Morning Jolt was, “The Congressional Box Office is Very ‘In’ Right Now.”

Two nights ago, it tweeted a four-word message with a link to its analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) that has received far more attention than is normal for the CBO twitter account. As of writing this post, the tweet in question has racked up 62 responses, 846 retweets, and 542 likes.

That might not sound like a lot; the truth is, it isn’t. Donal Trump’s tweets, for example, often receive tens of thousands of ‘likes.’ But relative to the usual engagement on the CBO’s tweets, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

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Since January first of 2016, the CBO has tweeted 120 times. The median numbers of responses, retweets, and ‘likes’ to those tweets were respectively 0, 3, and 2. In fact, this latest tweet is responsible for nearly half of all the reactions garnered by the CBO’s account over that time period.

So what does this tell us?

The most obvious insight is that people are paying more attention to the CBO since the administration change. That’s not surprising; the CBO evaluates economic and budget proposals, and there are quite a few shakeups going on in that department right about now. The agency has been firing on all cylinders to keep up with demands from Congress, doubling the frequency of its tweets since Trump took office (.48 tweets/day compared with .24 tweets/day during the previous year).

In the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the CBO only averaged 9.5 ‘retweets’ per tweet–and that’s including a January 17th tweet that was responsible for 405 retweets alone (if you exclude that post, the account averaged 5 retweets per post). Since the beginning of the Trump administration, that average has jumped to 39.6 (7.6 if you don’t include the latest viral tweet).

Another insight: Negative feelings about the AHCA are driving the CBO’s recent popularity surge. The only two tweets with significant activity in the past year (look at the spikes in the graphs above) were about the AHCA and the effects of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A cursory glance through the responses to both tweets reveals that most of the commenters are detractors of the current administration who oppose changes to the ACA.

It would be a mistake to use this as a proxy for national consensus on the AHCA, however. Twitter often skews liberal.

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For the record, the CBO writes a killer blog (I use the term loosely, for obvious reasons). It’s a great source of unfiltered information about economic ideas from Washington. You can sign up to receive email updates from it here. And, if the CBO is reading this, don’t forget about us when you get famous.